Individual-centric Technology

Take some basic human needs and add the inexorable progress of technological development. You end up with a communications world where the individual is the center of everything.

Radu Popescu-Zeletin, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems in Berlin, one of the field’s most prominent think tanks, and his colleagues in research labs around the world are more interested in what will happen in the next decade. They don’t know precisely what will emerge from a technological standpoint. But many of them envision what Popescu-Zeletin calls an individual-centric model, “intelligent enough to adapt to the individual, wherever you are — anytime, any place and according to your personal preferences.”